The phrase "Fulton Ferry" can refer either to the section of Brooklyn at which the ferries landed, to the ferry rout, or to the boat itself. Chapter twelve appears to invoke the last of these, clearly positioning the viewer on a ferry boat approaching Manhattan. Steam-powered ferry service between Brooklyn and Manhattan began in 1814, and was the principle means of transportation between the cities until the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883. From 1883 on, use of the ferries declined steadily. In 1921 the companies that operated the ferries were verging on collapse – the boats already a thoroughly disused and outmoded feature of New York life. In 1924 – three years after New York, The Nation’s Metropolis’ publication – ferry service between the two points stopped completely.

"New York from Fulton Ferry" is the last of the book's chapters to focus on lower Manhattan – a focus it shares with every one of the preceding chapters excepting the first – "Times Square." The twelfth of twenty-five chapters, it is positioned almost exactly at the book's midpoint, and it serves as a reflection upon and conclusion for the first half of the book. Marcus distinguishes chapter twelve from chapters one through eleven by allowing it to call upon those preceding chapters more explicitly than they call upon one another. Where each of the other chapters had represented the books over-arching concerns at a specific close range, chapter twelve insists - both in the prose and in the drawing - upon panoramic distance and broad overview. In distancing the seeing subject from the seen object, chapter twelve can not only revisit, but also redress some of the positions taken by the earlier chapters.

Along with this distance comes the most sharply defined and clearly specified representations of the city yet to appear in the book. There is a sense in which Marcus sees the buildings’ new legibility as preferable to the cacophonous haze of concrete and stele in the earlier chapters. Those blurry drawings served the purpose of severing New York from its standardized and commodified souvenir representations, but they also risked enacting a readership of Father Knickerbockers – people unable to critique the new forms of the twentieth century because unable to look at them with any comprehension. Such readers are capable of awe and fear, but not of judgement.

But this new clarity comes at a tremendous cost; chapter twelve represents Manhattan in precisely the language which chapter four refuses. It submits to the easy legibility of the souvenir postcard and represents the Brooklyn Bridge and Woolworth Building in the most explicit terms available. The Bridge, as it is rendered in drawing twelve, has the most clearly defined contour and most intricately specified detail of any structure drawn in the first half of the book. It would be recognizable to anyone who had seen even in a photograph of it – the book’s visual codes have begun to abandon their privileging of "the man who knows." They address instead the same mass audience as that addressed by the souvenir book or postcard. There is some doubt, in this chapter, that the machine age’s visual structures will allow for the possibility of any address structure besides that presumed by mass culture.

While it is not as sharply drawn as the Bridge, the Woolworth Building is referred to by name for the first time in chapter twelve. The book’s most extended treatment of the Woolworth before chapter twelve – chapter nine – supplies no signifier for the tower except for its height; Father Knickerbocker is wholly unable to consider the structure as anything but a number. In chapter twelve Marcus finally tells the reader that the tower "is called ‘Woolworth’" (the quotation marks signifying the lingering awkwardness with which the unfamiliar name is pronounced). Chapter twelve even repeats the figure by which the earlier chapter had referred to the Woolworth (eight hundred feet), as if to make certain that its reversionary relation to chapter nine it fully legible. Remembering the number eight hundred, the reader can retroactively install the name Woolworth into the earlier chapter. The reader is asked to return to the superstitious and stupefied moment of stepping off the Fulton Ferry as Father Knickerbocker, but this time armed with the knowledge gained in chapter twelve.

The comparison is suggestive on the book’s continuing resignation to the codes of the new city. The shock of modern form has subsided enough to make way, in this chapter, for the imposition of a linguistic regime. The book’s entry into the modern world’s nomenclature at once enables and is enabled by the distance apparent in chapter twelve’s drawing. As in certain psychoanalytic narratives of human development, the capacity to describe the world in words puts distance between the describer and the described, and this distance is connected both to a sense of loss (primarily the loss of infancy’s pre-subjective connections to the object world) and to a sense of agency (the capacity to like, dislike, recognize, desire, etc.). To enter into the language of modernity may be to submit to that language’s authority, but it is only in doing so that the book is able to extract itself from Father Knickerbocker’s infantile stupor. In submitting to the modern world’s regime, the book is able to look at the modern landscape in comprehending sorrow, rather than with in speechless awe.

The recovery of the Woolworth name is not the only avenue through which chapter twelve revisits chapter nine, this chapter also makes use of chapter nine’s allegorical positioning of the sun. In chapter nine Father Knickerbocker sees the Woolworth aglow with the rising sun, but the spectator in the drawing sees the dark silhouette of the building as the sun sets behind it. While the earlier chapter had let this inconsistency stand, chapter twelve’s prose vignette resolves the conflict by concluding with a definitive and final sunset. As the spectator looks further and further into the sky, imagining the even taller buildings to come, s/he sees not the dawning new era which the new architecture was so widely believed to anticipate, but a symbol of conclusion and mortality. Too look to the future in New York is to look not towards a mechanical utopia, but towards a city past its peak, and headed steadily for total darkness.

The second paragraph of chapter twelve’s prose sketch verbalizes the narrative which chapter two represents pictorially. In the early nineteenth century, the view of New York from Fulton Ferry would indeed have been of church spires and ship masts. In 1921 their egalitarian civility towards one another has been drowned out by the skyscrapers’ remorseless competition for the title of world’s tallest building (and that of their inhabitants for world’s richest man). The Woolworth may by supreme for the moment, but its dominance is rooted in its most ephemeral feature. It cannot stay the tallest building in the world for long, and so it lacks what ought to have been the enduring value of Trinity Church or City Hall.

Chapter twelve comes closer than any other in the book to critiquing the bankrupt values and aesthetics of modern New York; where the other chapters insist on the presence of the nineteenth century, chapter twelve is the first to explicitly mourn it as "lost." But the book can only represent Manhattan in these terms by appropriating the exhausted twentieth century postcard clichés of which it is so suspicious. Nowhere in the book is the subtle duplicity of Marcus’ position staged with more elegance. The twentieth century is problematic, but it is inevitable; the nineteenth century was beautiful, but it is irrevocably lost. There is a need for that loss to be mourned, but the language through which it could be mourned is part of the lost symbolic order. Chapter twelve is the book’s most fully articulated meditation on this, the project with which New York, the Nation’s Metropolis is most consistently concerned. It is the centerpiece of the entire text in this sense, attempting more overtly than any other to mourn adequately the passing of the nineteenth century, but more aware than any previous chapter that the unfeeling language of the twentieth century is the only one available to the one who mourns.